using inheritance in struts

Is is possible to have a action form bean which will have common form elements and have separate action form beans for each kind of report that will inherit the base action form and use the form elements.

If yes, do I have to have the base action form entry in struts-config.xml

Same question with Action class. Can I have a base action class and have report specific action classes that inherit the base action class. because in my case for every report that the application needs to generate it has to check roles that will be available in request cookies. (jaas roles is not possible in this case. has to be request cookies) can I have that functionality in base action class and have report specific actions in their respective action classes. And also what configuration needs to be done in struts-config.xml

Make an entry in struts-config.xml for each subclass. There is no need to put the base class anywhere in struts-config.xml

For an Action class, the process is:

Write your base class extending Action. Your execute method should contain logic that is performed for all actions. My suggestion is to make it return null if everything is OK, and have it return an ActionForward to an error page if it encounters an error.